Dinosaur fans: Science Museum shows the new, less-well known

Macalester College professor Kristi Curry Rogers, a consultant on the "Ultimate Dinosaurs" exhibit that opens Saturday at the Science Museum of Minnesota, poses Friday with two dinosaurs she helped excavate: Majungosaurus, right, and Rapetosaurus. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

If you go to buy a dinosaur toy for your kid, you'll easily find a North American triceratops or tyrannosaurus Rex, but you won't find toy models of any of the species on display in the touring "Ultimate Dinosaurs" opening Saturday at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

That's because the exhibit focuses on more recently discovered and much less familiar dinosaurs that lived in the southern hemisphere.

Because dinosaurs so dramatically and mysteriously went extinct, people are tempted to think of them as an unsuccessful species, said Joe Imholte, the museum's director of special exhibits.

"But the truth is that dinosaurs were hugely successful," he said. "They lived for millennia longer than humans have been around." And during their long sojourn on Earth, they evolved quite distinctly in different parts of the world.

The exhibit, from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, includes reconstructions of 20 full-size skeletons from South America and Africa and a couple of species from Madagascar studied by Macalester College professors Kristi Curry Rogers and Ray Rogers.

Visitors will learn how geologic history affected the evolution of dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era, 250 million to 65 million years ago, when the massive super-continent of Pangaea broke into Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south. As the land masses drifted apart, early dinosaurs were separated and evolved independently in different regions.

Among the dinosaurs in the exhibit are the big South American carnivore Giganotosaurus, which looks a lot like a T-Rex with a narrower jaw; the nearly 7,000-pound Suchomimus, found in what's now the Sahara Desert in Niger; and Cryolophosaurus, from Antarctica, who sports a pompadour-like head crest.

Wall murals show what the living creatures might have looked like wandering through their habitats. A soundtrack of roars evokes their presence, though of course, no one knows how the creatures actually sounded -- and that's part of their allure.

"There is lots of room for imagination with dinosaurs," Curry Rogers said. "Part of the fascination is that they're so unknown that it allows us to create our own view of them. Scientists have that same feeling. We get to imagine. We develop hypothesis and then try to prove them wrong, and if we can't, we say, 'Well, OK, this is a good idea for now.' There is so much room for interpretation."

In the 1990s, while Curry Rogers was a young a paleontologist at the Science Museum, she was part of a team excavating a new plant-eating dinosaur in Madagascar they named Rapetosaurus, after the mischievous Malagasy folklore giant Rapeto. As an adult, Rapetosaurus may have been up to 60 feet long. The specimen on display in the exhibit is impressive enough at just under 20 feet, with a sinuous long neck, a small head the size of man's shoe and a long tail. The skeleton is mounted in a crouch, under attack from a meat-eating dinosaur called Majungosaurus, a puny-armed, big-jawed theropod from Madagascar researched extensively by Curry Rogers' husband, geology professor Ray Rogers.

Curry Roger's current work focuses on how fast dinosaurs grew. She looks for clues to a dinosaur's age by studying slices of femur bone under a microscope. She estimates the smallish Rapetosaurus on display was a juvenile about 5 years old.

"We think dinosaurs were a lot like elephants, growing relatively quickly to their adult size and then maybe living 50 or 60 years," she said. "But we don't know for sure. It's a hypothesis."

The last time the Science Museum of Minnesota hosted a dinosaur exhibit was "Chinasaurs" in 2004. St. Paul is "Ultimate Dinosaurs" second stop in the United States, following a run in Cincinnati. To make it more appealing to kids, museum staff have added activities, such as puzzles in the shapes of dinosaur bones and a stop-action set where kids can make movies with dinosaur models,

They expect this one to be popular.

"We've been interested in touring a dinosaur exhibit for a long time," Imholte said. "And we're pretty excited about this one."

Maja Beckstrom can be reached at 651-228-5295.

IF YOU GO

What: "Ultimate Dinosaurs"

When: Saturday-Aug. 24

Where: Science Museum of Minnesota, 120 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul

Cost: $21 for adults and $12 for kids and seniors (includes admission to museum's regular exhibits) . Tickets are sold for a specific date and time, but a new kid-friendly policy allows visitors to leave and re-enter the exhibit anytime during the three hours after their assigned entry time. Tickets to companion IMAX film "Dinosaurs Alive!" is additional $7.